PERFORATION 6.12 (Patreon)

Short and sweet, as some of the lovelier chapters can be! Didn't want to push this one too hard, and it felt pretty organic as a stopping point, even if it is closer to the disgusting 2k word mark than the sexy, glorious 3k. Anyways! We've got some solid setup for shit to kick off more in meatlands as Ilia gets a win for the first time in forever, babes!

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Blurble blurble. Gurp. Blub. Blup. Grrrgle glrgle.

 Blrrrby glurp.

Pop.

Schlllllrp glrglr bllllck

– Ongoing dialogue.

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The walk is a lot different than before. For one thing, I get a lot less harassment from the creatures, what I originally called “sludgelings”. I don’t know if they’re trying to avoid me because of the presence of the computer on the wrist, or if being a Greater Fleshling has that much of an effect on their aggression. They don’t run away if I approach, but they also don’t try to attack me if I don’t attack first. 

It makes things weirdly, distressingly peaceful. Without the threat of active combat, I have much more ability to just… walk around. Look at things. Experience the world in a more casual way. 

I don’t know if I like it. I spend a lot of my focus on crafting things with the local ingredients, nothing that impressive, and on power-walking towards my destination. 

SYMBIONT CREATED: Twitching Digits, Twitching Limb, Refined Bonespear

When in doubt, go back to old reliable. Her free hand, beside the Glove, has been retrofitted with additional, sharp little fingers. Two more arms have been grafted to my ribs, half-connected to my shoulders and pectorals. 

ADAPTATION ACQUIRED: Multilimbed

It didn’t kick in right away, this time. It took a while of using the added Symbionts to get the Adaptation to form, which I credit my increased CANALISATION stat with. It takes longer for them to properly integrate, and they move more stiffly, take longer to feel familiar. 

A worthy trade off, if it means I have the slightest bit more control over what happens to me. I refuse to be so easily changed as I was before. I refuse. 

That’s the sort of thing that leads to Jane. 

I shudder at that thought, flinching away from that particular thought-stove.

In my hands, I’m holding a long, slender staff, its tip sharpened to a spiral point. Where the bone-shrapnel from the trees of the valley aren’t long enough to make a staff, I’ve used bits of the sludgelings and the scab-gravel to make a half-living mud, a black slime that melts ever so slightly into the bone and works as a decent binding agent. The tip, I left the Glove to work on, but even as I tried to hold it back, I felt the skill activate.

SCULPTOR OF FLESH.

It makes the meat, the bone, the smile, move like clay. It makes it hold its shape when I ask it to. It makes it easier for me to sculpt biology to match my vision of it, molding easily beneath my hands. 

I can’t focus on it. I can’t keep using it. Can’t even dream of using it to its full potential, because that means thinking about Jane.

Flinch.

I keep walking, feeling the comfortable heft of the spear in my hands. 

A club is nice. A blade is fine. But in a functional body, one with both enough strength and enough coordination to use it properly, neither option is the best choice. I’m not proficient as a combatant with either one of them, for one thing, and whether or not the game will give me a SKILL to compensate isn’t something I feel like relying on. 

So, we go back to basics. Back to the OG. Spears. Humanity’s first weapon for a goddamn reason. It’s got reach, it’s got a sharp point, using it at its most basic level is literally just about poking someone with one end and occasionally whacking someone when that doesn’t work. 

I’m not fucking around. If it can be optimized, I’m optimizing it. I am not here to explore an open world, or grind, or farm, not when I have those icons on my map to travel to. 

I’ve got ideas. Plans. If I shatter the bone trees into enough shrapnel, mix them with enough slime, make a sort of mosaic out of it, I can make some armor to coat myself with. I can try eating some of the materials around me, the acidic slime of the sludgelings, the gravel, just consume it until something happens. I can go back to the swamp, get some fungus, use it as a foundation for something. INTERPRETIVE CRAFTSMANSHIP can probably do a lot with everything around me if I let myself slip deeper into the SKILL.

But I don’t want to. And I have places to go. And I’m optimizing. 

I don’t want to dive into my SKILLs. I don’t want to go slowly and focus on special projects. I want to get stronger. I want to go to those icons, the blood markers on my minimap on the computer on my arm.

So, I optimize. I made some basic shit, better than my previous creations in the game, and am walking. 

I’m almost there. Almost to that blood-shaped dot in that weird green map. 

I could probably do a lot more if I used my inv–

Hmm. Almost there. We’re not having that thought, and we’re almost there, and I’m trying really fucking hard to keep fucking focused, because I came here to escape what I did and do something useful and one of those has been a lot easier to do than the other.

I crest another little hill in the massive valley all around me, and catch sight of exactly what I was hoping for. 

At the computer on my wrist, the blinking dot that represents me (or the device itself, weighing me down where it drags down my arm) is nearly on top of the droplet-shaped marker. 

Over the hill, there’s a bit of red. Deeper and livelier than the gravel all around. Like a singular scab compared to the absolute wash of maroon-red of the scab-gravel all around. 

It looks familiar. A blood blister coming up out of the center of a little dip between the hills. 

I want to cry in relief. I’m pretty emotionally messy at the moment, but it still feels kind of appropriate. 

The blood-bubble looks just like it did when I met the strongest Symbiont I have.

I’m composed enough to stay efficient. Optimized. 

Spear in hand, I walk in a circle around the blister, flattening some of the tall hair-grass as I go. I check around every hillside, tracking with my eyes every bit of movement I catch sight of, until I am absolutely sure that there’s nothing about to leap out of the dark to slaughter me.

Only then do I turn to look at the blood-blister. 

Dense. Blocky. Like an 8-bit rendition redirected through the highest possible graphics card. Bright red and dark and light. 

My breathing is shaky. 

Slowly, I reach a hand forward. 

I poke it. 

Where my finger breaches the red, an over-exaggerated crack appears. A cartoony, boomer-shooter level design, three-pronged and dramatic, matching the strangeness of the videogamey visuals of the rest of it. 

And then it grows, glowing red from within.

And then a third time.

And then it cracks like an egg, wide open, and begins to BLEED.

For the second time, the low-lying valley I’m in floods with red, filling up like a swamp within seconds. It bubbles and burbles, flowing like syrup that drowns the hair and leaves scab-gravel floating to the surface awkwardly. 

It doesn’t slow until the space from here to the next four hillsides has been painted completely crimson. 

The soil of flesh and scab below drinks it up, slowly but surely, until the original blood-blister is re-revealed. 

Exactly like before, down to the very quiver of its cell walls, there is a little red blood cell floating in the center of it. 

A bright red circle, plump around the edges and delightfully round.

I’m definitely not crying. 

It wiggles a little bit as I look at it, like it’s waiting for something.  It’s less reactive than I expected, but also more alive, just as real as the first one.

Rather than reaching out to it, ready to absorb it, I crouch in front of it, painting myself up to my waist in blood.

“Hey, little guy.”

It stays very still for a bit… but then, rather abruptly, makes a burble sound as it wriggles in the thick crimson still flowing beneath it.

I smile. Can’t help it– the damn thing is weirdly adorable as ever.

“I don’t know if you can understand me,” I say. “I know words can be hard. But… there’s another one like you inside of me. And I think it got hurt. Or it got really, really tired. And… I can’t talk to it anymore. But. If… if I let you in. Will you try and help it? Make sure it’s ok?”

I’m not really sure what I expected. Frankly, maybe nothing. Expecting a big semi-sentient bloodcell that, in my experience, acts like a literal puppy, to understand whole sentences? Not a recipe for success, necessarily. Maybe it literally doesn’t have any clue what I’m saying, and has no way of knowing. 

But it was important for me to say it, too. Important for me. I put that intention out there, and I ask a question, and the little creature floating inside the crimson wellspring in front of me bobs up and down placidly in response. 

I give it a few seconds anyways. Just in case.

Blorp.

A bubble comes up and pops, floating out from beneath the blood cell. It gives a little wiggle, as if tickled. 

Fuck it, then. Good enough. 

I reach out a long, alien hand, and touch it gently on its surface. 

The way it enters me is… hard to describe. For one thing, it seems like it pops, but not in a normal way. It’s more of an inversion, almost, like it’s coming inside out, and since it’s inside out, so is my arm? Maybe?

GLIMPSE BEYOND pushes at me, recovered enough from its previous exhaustion to strain at the leash, but I keep it back. I don’t need it for this. I don’t. I don’t need to see anything, I don’t need it to tear through what I understand and can think of to dig out what things mean, or what it says things mean.

So I touch the blood cell, and it inverts and melts and remolds itself, and then it’s in me. 

SYMBIONT ACQUIRED: DIVINE BLOODLING (II)

And then I’m alive again.

I don’t know how I didn’t notice it before. Just how badly I’ve been. Just how much an absence could be missed. 

When the Bloodling was originally active, before it sacrificed itself to save my life, I could feel it like I feel all of my Symbionts. A total and absolute knowledge, which stands above and beyond any other limitation. More than the shape of my own face, I know every contour of the Glove, in details so intimate that I could analyze it down to each individual component without ever needing to do anything more than think a question for it. 

The Bloodling was that, but for my entire body. My entire circulatory system, at any rate. I could always feel it, grounding me, alive in me, joyful and bouncy and strangely innocent, like a damn puppy waddling around through my veins. After I died, after I woke up and it was gone…

I had enough to deal with. I came back from the dead. The pain of having my arm torn off, of bleeding out, the absolute panic and trauma of being hunted like an animal, all of it, I was barely coping. I’m still barely coping, damnit. But it fell to the background, because thinking about my Symbionts has always had its ups and downs, and because I had new shit to deal with as I started coping, and now here I am.

And now here it is again. That feeling of pressure. Of presence. An in-depth map of every vein in my body, in this Fleshling’s body, telling me where I am and how I’m moving. 

I don’t have time to cry. I’m keeping things optimized. 

The screen on my forearm winks at me, bright green letters scrolling by.

“7H47 W4S V3RY L0V3LY FRI3ND 4ND FRI3ND 0F FRI3ND!!!”

I give a half-hearted chuckle. 

“Yeah. …Thank you.”

Then I inhale, filling up my weirdly shaped lungs deeply enough that I feel my chest hurt a little, then exhale it all in one harsh breath. 

“Alright. Alright! Bring up the map again, please. If we can get two, then we can get more. Let’s start fucking farming.”